In Jon Rice’s office is a small incubator full of tiny insect eggs—one of many such incubators kept at Kraig Biocraft Laboratories (KBL), the Michigan-based polymer development company where Rice is ...

Cave-dwelling orb spiders have adapted their webs so they act as tripwires for prey that crawl on the walls of the caves ...

Simulations showed that stretching aligns protein chains and increases hydrogen bonds, which act like tiny bridges between them. These changes enhance the silk’s strength, elasticity, and toughness.

The story of silk is full of the extraordinary. First Paraguay and Suriname have caterpillars larger than any in Europe, ...

Jumping spiders don’t build webs, but like their arachnid kin, they can produce silk. Some species are known to spin fine threads as they leap, presumably to stabilize takeoff and ensure a more ...

Spider silk is one of the most fascinating natural materials known to humans. It is more flexible than rubber yet tougher ...

Find out how web-spinning spiders do what they do and learn about the impressive, multipurpose material they use to catch their dinner. Spiders make their webs from silk, a natural fibre made of ...

While spider silk proteins are something you can make in your garage, making useful drag line fibers has proved a daunting challenge. Now, a team of scientists from Japan and Hong Kong are closer ...

When they weave their webs, spiders pull their silk threads. New simulations show stretching during spinning causes the protein chains within the fibers to align and the number of hydrogen bonds ...

Understanding how the stretching process strengthens spider silk is a key part of helping design stronger, biodegradable, silk-inspired materials for various applications. When spiders spin their webs ...

Scanning electron microscopy images of fibers from engineered spider silk. To validate their computational findings, the Northwestern team used spectroscopy techniques to examine how the protein ...